Notes

Tested with Debian Squeeze

Installation notes for Debian Squeeze

I had to install a basic system from DVD: netinstall didn't work since the installer doesn't know the wired network device. The installation medium was “Debian GNU/Linux testing _Squeeze_ - Official Snapshot amd64 DVD Binary-1 20100809-04:27”. The tested hardware is a ACER Travelmate 5740-333G25MN.

Immediately after the installation, wired networking worked flawlessly so i was in the game. To get wireless networking, i installed the broadcom-sta package and did “module-assistant a-i broadcom-sta”.

Adding acpi_osi=“Linux” to the kernel parameters fixed the brightness control.

For two finger scrolling i had to edit the xorg.conf. My relevant section (everything works as i want it) is:

I 'inherited' this laptop from my brother and decided to install Linux on it. Went for Debian Jessie (8.4, current stable).

Installation with Netinst was almost without problems, just had to deliver the firmware for the Broadcom WLAN adapter via USB, since it's from contrib instead of main. (for reference: the required firmware was bcm43xx-0.fw from the package 'firmware-brcm80211_0.36+wheezy.1_all.deb') You might want to pre-download and include it on the Netinst CD if you're proficient enough.

The other issues I encountered were pretty much the same as mentioned in the article, but required slightly different solutions.
For brightness control, I edited '/etc/default/grub' and added ' acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor' to the argument of the parameter 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT'.

For full touchpad support (it would only function with basic mouse options), I found it easiest to download and install the Package kde-config-touchpad (solutions for GNOME are somewhat easier), then reboot, then go to System Settings → Input Devices and from there everything was available in the newly added 'Touchpad' tab.

Everything else worked out of the box as well, didn't test features like webcam or card reader, though.

Doitsu, 2011/01/24 15:45

Sorry, was reading to fast :(

Doitsu, 2011/01/24 15:45

What's with the brightness-controll?

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